Human Experiences, Proximity, Augmented Reality and the Internet of Things

iBeacon Tutorial for iOS 7 by DevFright

While developers have time to play with the code ahead of the public launch of new versions of Apple software, there’s usually still a delay before we have a good set of tutorials on new features of Apple iOS.

When it comes to the iBeacon framework, the delay is exacerbated in part by it being one of the frameworks that had a lot less fanfare at WWDC. Some considered it an almost stealthy “NFC-killer” but that’s probably going a little too far.

In fact, iBeacons had one bullet on one slide at the keynote (although follow-up sessions dived in a bit deeper).

So…we have our eyes open for tutorials that walk you through developing for the new iBeacon framework.

DevFright Tutorial
The good folks at DevFright have put together a nice clean overview of the API. Their tutorial quickly explains what iBeacon is, give a few use cases as examples, and then dives right into the code.

After setting up the usual kinds of labels and outlets, it dives right in to setting up a phone as a beacon – showing how to transmit across Bluetooth, in essence letting other phones “know” that you’re there.

They then move on to cover receiving information and walk through detecting beacons and regions.

Regions and Core Location
At first glance, the tutorial doesn’t go into a lot of explanation on key concepts. However, there are links through to previous tutorials that have a deeper dive on things like the CLLocationManagerDelegate.

All in all, a great starting tutorial on iBeacons, although not for the novice to XCode.